Chapter Four
Jole’s next morning was spent locked down in one of what looked to be an endless string of confidential meetings going over assorted contractors’ bids on the construction of the new base. Budget and Logistics did the initial triage, but all final approvals had to be run past Haines and Jole, with the B&L officers jockeying for their favorites. Sergyar Command’s B&L departmental needs and those of the Emperor were normally fairly congruent, but not always, and Jole had to remind himself now and then, as voices rose and the highlighted numbers were presented again in brighter colors, which side he was on.
As they broke for a late lunch, he and Haines walked over to the officers’ mess together. Crossing the main quadrangle, Haines shaded his eyes and frowned at the distant mesa of plascrete pallets. “Have you managed to get any further with those Plas-Dan bastards?” he inquired.
“The Vicereine has promised to sic some of her forensic accounting people on it. Depending on what she can come up with and how fast—I’m hoping for early next week—we should be able to devise something useful. In the long run, we need plascrete more than vengeance.”
Haines grunted disconsolate concurrence. “Sucks some days, to have all these boys with guns and not be allowed to shoot anybody. It could be so cathartic.”
Jole could only snort agreement.
On the whole, Jole liked Fyodor Haines. The general had been assigned here only two years ago, and had so far proved the plodder type of officer, counting down the bare handful of years left to his twice-twenty—which meant, in the main, that everything got done on time and without unnecessary fuss. Vastly preferable for his actual peacetime duties than the thwarted-warrior type, which—an understandable antipathy to civilian contractors aside—Haines wasn’t.
Haines’s domestic life was currently in some mysterious disarray; his wife of many years had stayed back on Barrayar when he’d been posted to Sergyar, ostensibly to care for aged and ailing parents, possibly due to having reached some abrupt breaking point about moving one more time to follow the drum. His two older sons were now in college, one on Barrayar, one on Komarr, which accounted for his current austere lifestyle and most of his pay, but his daughter had been shipped out to Sergyar a few months back to join her father. Jole was uncertain if this constituted a promissory note that his wife would soon follow, or if young Frederica Haines had been seconded as a marital spy. If the latter, her mother’s suspicions were unjust; if Haines’s stolid allegiance to his marriage oath didn’t keep him from attempting some adulterous liaison, his aversion to emotional uproar certainly would.
As they cleared the cafeteria line and seized a small table by the windows, Haines said, “On another subject entirely, I have been commissioned as a scout.”
“Oh?” Jole unfolded his paper napkin and contemplated his limp sandwich. But the regulation stew and the stiffly clotted pasta had been even less enticing, on this subtropical day.
“Seems your officer corps is conspiring to throw you a surprise birthday party for your fiftieth. I could get behind the party idea, but I suggested you might not care so much for the surprise aspect.”
“That’s pretty much correct,” Jole agreed. Although a part of him could not help being secretly touched, even if the conspirators’ main motivation was a transparent desire to get drunk and set off fireworks. It was like the inverse of a mutiny. “I’m actually not wild about either part. I was planning to ignore the day, myself. All those getting-older jokes.”
“Been there, done that,” Haines, half-a-dozen years older than Jole, said without sympathy.
Jole’s brow wrinkled. “It seems a few months early to be planning any such thing.”
“Some of their notions seemed a touch grandiose. They wanted lead time.”
“Bored, are they? I bet I could find them some more work.”
Haines’s lips twitched. “The advantage of letting them set up something on base, besides the convenience, would be control. With Base Security in charge of the collateral damage, rather than the Kareenburg Municipal Guard.”
“The advantage of letting them set up something fifty kilometers out in the desert would be that they couldn’t burn anything down.”
“The catering would be less handy.”
“Consider it a field exercise?”
“Mm, maybe,” said Haines, judging by his narrowed eyes, drawn by this vision.
“Kayburg Guard would have to be notified anyway,” Jole pointed out. “Given that the boys and girls will want to bring dates. Call it joint maneuvers. If you imply you’re considering downtown Kayburg as an alternate venue, they’ll fall all over themselves to help you set up out in the country instead.”
Haines chuckled. “I like the way you think sometimes, Oliver. Remind me not to get crosswise to you in a debate.” He took a ruminative bite of stew, and added, “And families. Haul out the wives and families to the picnic, for ballast.”
“Good thinking.”
“You could bring a date.”
The party idea took on a sudden new charm. “I could ask Vicereine Vorkosigan.”
Haines pursed his lips judiciously. “Not what I would call a date, but that would set a tone, for sure.”
It might at that, although possibly not the sedate one Haines was clearly hankering for. But then, Haines didn’t know Cordelia very well.
“It wouldn’t settle any bets, though,” Haines added a bit morosely.
Jole didn’t bother to pretend not to understand. “What, betting whether I’d show up with a woman or a man?” His tone grew a trifle biting. “I see a way we could collude to clean up on that one. I could ask Consul Vermillion, and we could wax them all.”
Haines held up a contrite hand. “No business of mine, except that people ask me. As if I’d know!”
“I…did not realize that,” Jole conceded. Although he didn’t see how he had anything to apologize for. Because I don’t have anything in the first place?
Pared to its essentials, the Barrayaran officer corps favored heterosexual marital stability in its senior members mainly to cut down on the potential for ambient personal dramas slopping over into work, as they tended to do. But any nonstandard-issue personal life that supplied one’s superior officers with zero drama would do just as well, in Jole’s view. And it was a view he’d let be known, certainly. With an emphasis on the zero-drama part, because he’d thought that could stand to be underscored.
“I may be sorry I asked, but what are the current rumors about my personal life?” Or lack of one.
Haines shrugged. “They call you the dog who does nothing in the nighttime.”
“Come again?”
“Don’t look at me! I was told it’s a literary reference. Which probably accounts for it making no damn sense.” Haines scowled in retrospective suspicion. “A touch Cetagandan, if you ask me.”
“I see.” Well, that could have been worse. The trouble with giving rumor nothing to chew on was that it freed it to make up anything. “Welcome to the fishbowl, Admiral Jole. Though it’s not as bad here as at Komarr Command. Or Home Fleet, God help ’em.” He’d aspired to Komarr Command once, the hot seat of the empire. And just where, in his last few years, had what had once been a driving youthful ambition drained away? Could it be that he was…content, here on Sergyar?
“That is happily true,” Haines agreed.
Jole considered the general. Fyodor was pretty level-headed, an experienced father, and a good sample of an average officer. And he knew how to be closed-mouthed. As a test subject, as Cordelia would no doubt put it, he could be nearly ideal. Jole tried the sentence once, secretly inside his mouth, for practice. And then quelled his doubts—his panic?—and let it fly: “Actually, for my fiftieth birthday, I was thinking of having a son.”
Haines’s eyebrows went up, but he did not, for example, fall off his not-very-comfortable cafeteria chair or have any other such overreaction. “Don’t you have a few preliminaries to get through first? Or have you managed to smuggle them past all your interested observers?”
“Not as many as one would think. The Vicereine”—yes, hide behind Cordelia’s skirts—“has been pitching the virtues of that new rep center downtown. It seems all you have to do is walk in, present yourself, and buy a donated egg. All right, you do have to jump through a few hoops to prove yourself a, er, qualified purchaser. But it skips a lot of the other difficult middle steps.”
“Dating, courtship, weddings? In-laws?” Haines’s mouth twisted up. “Seems like cheating, really.”
“Galactics—I’m told—do it.” All the time was probably not technically correct.
“Well, galactics,” said Haines vaguely.
“I admit, when I picture the scenario, I keep seeing a boy of about, oh, seven. Age of reason and all that. One I could talk to, and do things with. I’m not sure how you get from the single-cell stage to that one, though.”
Haines shrugged. “Having an infant aboard is no holiday, but any man who can learn to field-strip a weapon can learn to change a damn nappie. Just handle the kid gently but firmly, like an unexploded bomb. You wonder how some of those whiners would have dealt with the old horse cavalry days—manure by the metric ton, back then. I’ve no patience with a man who’s afraid to get his hands dirty. And at least babies more-or-less stay where you put them, at that age. Now, toddlers…suicidal maniacs, the lot of ’em, boy or girl. I’m so glad that stage is over.” He took a firm swallow of his iced tea. “I don’t know why you don’t have a mate—of whatever flavor—Oliver, and it’s no business of mine, but I will tell you, parenting is a team sport. You need backup, reserves. I admit, back when, it was more my wife’s family and the other base women trading favors than me, depending on where we were. But that does seem to me the one big flaw in your battle plan.”
“The Vicereine claims one can hire help.”
Haines snorted. “On Sergyar? Have you tried to hire anyone on Sergyar lately?”
“About a hundred contractors?”
Haines waved a conceding hand. “Point. But it doesn’t get any easier scaled down.” His eyes narrowed. “I’ve suggested to Freddie that she get a part-time job of some kind. She thinks it’s because I’m too cheap to give her an allowance, but I think it might help keep her too busy to get into trouble. Except what would she do with the money? Like giving ammunition to a drunk. Babies are just a challenge. Teenagers are a nightmare. Look ahead, Oliver.”
“I…think I might do better taking it one step at a time.”
“Mm, that’s the way you do have to take it. Maybe fortunately.” Haines added after a moment, “I don’t deny I have mixed feelings about those replicator centers, but I have to admit, I’d prefer it for my daughter. Just think. She’d never have to date a boy at all.” He paused in apparent contemplation of this attractive state of theoretical affairs, or non-affairs.
“I’d think you were in an excellent position to intimidate suitors.”
“But everyone knows I’m not allowed to use the plasma cannons for personal purposes.”
Jole choked a laugh around his last mouthful of sandwich. “Besides, she’s only, what—fifteen?”
“A fact I have let be known, but I’m not sure it helps.” Haines sighed. “Horrible age, fifteen. Part of the time she’s still my little princess, Da’s Cadette, and then, with no warning—it’s like some hostile alien life-form takes over her brain. One minute it’s all puppies and ribbons, the next—the female werewolf!” Haines made claws of his hands and mimed a snarl, possibly the most expression Jole had ever seen the man display. “The bathroom is a war zone right now. Last week she had half her friends and the Cetagandan consul’s son in there, learning how to apply ghem face-paint patterns.”
“That seems…cultural,” Jole offered, in some attempted consolation.
“Eh, I suppose you’d think so. But when I made her clean it up after, perfectly reasonably, you’d think I was Mad Yuri come to life again.”
“Er…can’t you requisition a place with two bathrooms?”
“Base housing is crammed right now. I’d have to make some other officer’s family trade down.”
“Pull rank?”
“Mm, but that would also entail pulling rank on his wife, which would have, shall we say, proliferating consequences. Base wives have their own, what d’you call it—the Vicereine would probably say, culture. I’d call it an insurgency network. Cross them at your peril.” He added after a moment, “I did put myself on the waiting list, though.”
“That’s very conscientious.”
Haines shrugged. “Choose your ground, they say.” He opined after another brooding moment, “The only trouble with those uterine replicators is that they don’t do enough. Twenty! Why can’t some Betan boffin come up with one that keeps ’em in there till they’re twenty? I swear it would sell.” He sucked down the last of his iced tea, and crunched the ice.
As they walked back across the quadrangle for the afternoon rematch with B&L, Jole reflected that Cordelia seemed to be right about the secret parents’ club. He’d gained more insight into his general in the past hour than in fifty prior work-focused committee meetings. That Haines seemed willing to regard Jole as a…provisional prospective member?—seemed curiously encouraging. Though perhaps it was merely a case of misery-loves-company? Other people’s children had been a topic supremely uninteresting to Jole before now. He sensed those horizons shifting within his mind, opening up new vistas. Some of them were a little alarming.
Barrayar’s warships did not carry families, and its far-flung stations, principally charged with protecting vital and potentially disputed wormholes, did not encourage dependents to occupy expensive upside residence. Military families therefore tended to collect in just such downside shuttleport support bases as were Haines’s patch. In his upside career, Jole had mostly dealt with such issues at a distance, as distractions to his techs and troops in their tasks. It was possible the ground general might have more to teach the space admiral than Jole would at first have thought.
He was also getting a better sense of why Cordelia had been so insistent about those next-of-kin forms. Barrayaran history was full of details about what Aral had been doing during the first few years of the regency, which were also the first few years of his marriage—yet except for the shock of her cutting short the Pretender’s War by cutting short the Pretender, it was mostly silent about Cordelia. But what she’d mainly been occupied with had been infant Miles, during a period when it had been medically uncertain if the child would live. When she’d sent Aral off, for example, to that lethal slugging match for the Rho Cetan-route wormholes that was later dubbed the Third Cetagandan War, she’d been left to go it alone, still a stranger-sojourner on her adopted world—her father-in-law Count Piotr being more hazard than help at that point. What would that whole time have been like for Aral if there hadn’t been a Cordelia to entrust his beloved boy to?
Jole suspected that Miles might not have been the only casualty.
One expected the advent of children to rearrange one’s future. No one had told Jole that they could also rearrange one’s past. It seemed an extraordinary reach to have, for a set of boys who weren’t even blastospheres yet. He shook his head and followed Haines into the Admin building.
* * *
A few days later, Jole powered down his personal lightflyer on the pavement in front of the Viceroy’s Palace and slid out. Before he could step toward the front door, though, it opened partway, and Cordelia slipped through in a vaguely furtive manner. She was dressed for the backcountry in a sage-green T-shirt, sturdy tan trousers, and boots, and carried a canvas satchel. She waved at him and hurried over; he opened the passenger-side door and saw her safely within, then returned to the pilot’s seat.
“Away, fly away, before somebody else catches up to me with Just one more thing, Your Excellency…!”
“At your command, Vicereine.” Jole grinned and popped them into the air. “Where are we headed on our mystery errand, might I ask?”
“Mount Rosemont. I have the exact coordinates for when we get closer.”
Jole nodded and dutifully banked the lightflyer around. Mount Rosemont lay about two hundred kilometers to the southeast, and was the largest and most spectacular volcanic mountain of the scattered chain anchored by Kareenburg’s hollowed-out peak. One didn’t need coordinates to find it; even at this modest altitude he could see it, a broad and symmetrical shape on the horizon, its snowcapped top glowing like a beacon in the westering light of late afternoon.
“Thank you so much for the lift,” Cordelia added. “I really wanted some company for this errand. And not just to hold the vidcam.”
He was to hold a vidcam? Curious. “I thought you had plenty of company. Rykov, the ImpSec crew, your entire staff…?” In fact, she usually needed to be quite firm to successfully shed them.
She grimaced. “Not the right kind of company.”
“And I am?” Heartening notion.
She nodded, and leaned her head against the seatback in a gesture not, he thought, entirely of physical weariness. Kareenburg rapidly fell away behind them, and the outlying settlements strung along the watercourses passed as well. All signs of invading humanity soon vanished into the level red scrublands of the semi-desert.
“So…what’s in the satchel?” he tried, when she did not at once go on.
She grunted an almost-laugh, and burrowed her hand inside to lift out a sealed plastic bag containing about a kilogram of…?
“Sand,” she answered his raised eyebrows.
“Sand?”
“Betan sand. It arrived here by jump-transit a couple of days ago, but this is the first I’ve been able to break away.” She added after a second, “Have you had your dinner yet? I didn’t think to ask.” Which suggested just what part of her packed schedule she’d sacrificed to create this break.
“No, but I have ration bars in the boot along with the medkit, if we don’t get back in time for a civilized meal.” And if they did, might he persuade her to join him? Somewhere better than the officers’ mess, not that Kareenburg offered any wide array of choices.
She chuckled. “You would. Always prepared, Oliver. I suppose it’s habit by now.”
“Pretty much,” he conceded. “So. Sergyar has sand.” In a bewildering array of types and grades, judging by his recent experiences with the contractors. “Why are we importing it from Beta Colony?”
“It was sent.” She sighed. “I know you know something about how Aral and I first met, right here on Sergyar? Except it wasn’t named Sergyar yet. In my Survey log it was only an alphanumeric string and a stunning discovery.”
He nodded in a way that he hoped would not discourage her from going on. Jole had heard the tale several times, from Aral and from her, somewhat differently remembered; he never tired of the repeats, though, since some odd new detail seemed to pop up in every version. Not quite How I met your mother, but still personally riveting.
Aral’s version opened with him standing guard on the invasion-supply cache as captain of his old cruiser the General Vorkraft, in distant exile from Barrayaran HQ, Aral’s career being in deep political eclipse just then. He’d taken his ship on a scheduled patrol out through the short chain of wormholes leading toward Escobar, then returned to his orbital watch only to find that a Betan Astronomical Survey vessel had slipped in by another route and blithely set up shop while his back was turned. His attempt to peacefully, if firmly, intern the interloping Betans had been thoroughly botched by a group of politically motivated mutineers, who’d seized the opportunity to stage their coup when Aral had led a team downside to capture the Betan survey party led by Cordelia. Things had gone rapidly to hell thereafter, in both versions, though Cordelia’s usually included the most cutting editorial asides. How the pair of them, equally if differently abandoned by the ships they’d commanded, had teamed up to recapture the General Vorkraft and save Aral’s life and subsequent spectacular career was a legend by now. And, like most legends, distorted in the public retelling.
“My second-in-command, Reg Rosemont, was shot dead in that first melee—nerve disruptor, he never had a chance. I always think of him as the first casualty of the Barrayar-Escobar War. Well, him and Truth.”
Truth is always War’s first victim, the old saying went. And Jole had reason to suspect that was…truer than usual, for that particular war. He nodded.
“Burying him before we left our Survey campsite was practically the first task Aral and I ever shared. Reg was our xeno-geologist—I think I told you that once—brilliant fellow. God, the waste of it all. Anyway, when we were officially slotting in names to go along with the grid numbers for all the mountains last year, I held out for renaming HJ-21 after him. It seemed…I don’t know. Something. I sure as hell wasn’t going to let them name anything else after Prince Serg.”
“Mm,” said Jole. Vorbarr Sultana politics had been a snake pit in Serg’s era, for all that the crown prince had died heroically—and, it seemed, luckily for the empire—at Escobar. Jole had once remarked to Aral that he was glad his own career hadn’t come along till much later. Aral had just said, So am I.
“So, I told the Barrayaran Embassy on Beta to pass that news along to whatever surviving family of Reg’s they could locate, which they dutifully did. In consequence, a couple of days ago, this”—she lifted the satchel—“turned up in the Palace mail, along with a letter from Reg’s sister. I think I met her once…twice? She was apparently the only family member who still remembered him much. Forty-five years ago, after all. There being no plans to disinter poor Reg and ship his remains to Beta, she thought this might be the next best thing—bring a little Betan soil to him. She asked me to put it on his grave. I thought we could get a vid of me doing so, and send it back to her.” She frowned down at the satchel in her lap, reverting to her old Betan Survey mode by adding, “It’s been sterilized for microorganisms, of course.”
“And she taps the Vicereine of Sergyar for this?”
“No, she taps Reg’s old commanding officer, I think.”
“That’s…nearly Barrayaran. Betan feudal ties?”
“Something like. Or whatever one can get, out of a generally uncaring and forgetful world.”
An updraft from a warm patch of ground below lifted the flyer with a lurch. Jole overrode the correctors before they dropped the flyer and its passengers back to the set course with undue jaw-clopping haste. Rising with the thermal was a faint, spiraling cloud: a flock of tiny radials, each one no bigger than a fingertip, shimmering like the soap bubbles they resembled. Unfortunately, as they splattered noisily against the canopy of a flyer plowing through them at several hundred kilometers an hour, they popped less like soap and more like snot. Jole grimaced and turned on the canopy sonics; the slime slithered away to the sides and was blown off.
This species of radial occupied somewhat the niche of parasitic insects, being blood-sucking biters of the local fauna; but being also very slow moving, they were easy for humans to brush away from their skin. Slapping them in place was not recommended, as the ensuing residue was more corrosive than the original bite would have been. He would have to hose down his lightflyer promptly when they got back to Kareenburg. “Gah!”
Cordelia grinned sideways at him. “I admit, I do not love those things myself. But I’d rather run into the little ones than the big ones.”
Which had an alarming tendency to not so much squash as explode. “Really. Any side bets as to which Sergyaran species will be the first to go extinct under their new human management?”
“No takers, I’m afraid.” She added after a reflective moment, “People petition for plasma arcs to defend themselves, but really, that’s overkill. Not at all sporting, either. You can take one of those big suckers out with a burning stick.” She added after another moment, “If you don’t object to setting your hair on fire.” And, after a longer, more meditative pause, “Or one can use a laser pointer.”
Jole bit back a smile. “Laser pointer? Really? How would you know this, Cordelia?”
“It was an experiment,” she returned, a bit primly.
“In biology, or sport?”
“Mm, some of both. I was doing the biology. Aral was considering the sporting aspects. Granted, he didn’t love the bloated little vampires either.”
The ground was starting to rise below them, changing from scrubland to scattered forest to solid forest as the altitude wrung more water out of the air. Cordelia supplied the exact coordinates, and the lightflyer beat upslope and partway around the mountain to a level where the forest began to again grow patchy and stunted, this time from the night chill of the heights.
“Have you been up here before? I mean, since that first time,” Jole inquired, looking for a safe landing zone in the spot that Cordelia and his nav system agreed looked about right. There was a nasty steep ravine to avoid, and uneven sloping ground, and lightflyer-grabbing branches from what passed for the Sergyaran version of trees. They shared the same generally fractal design as both Old Earth and Barrayaran trees, anyway, tending here to muted gray-green color schemes.
“Once, soon after we were assigned to Sergyar. We came up and burned a Barrayaran death-offering, by way of propitiation to whatever gods or ghosts haunt this place. The marker was still there all right back then…thirteen years ago, I suppose. But the ground could have subsided or shifted since, or animals, or…well, we’ll see.”
“Hm.” Glad he wasn’t trying to do this after dark, Jole found an opening and eased the lightflyer down to a reasonably level landing. He checked his sidearm—a mere stunner, but sufficient to drop most of Sergyar’s more hazardous wildlife without further argument—and joined Cordelia in the undergrowth. She peered around and began walking back and forth; she was soon puffing in the thin air. Not being entirely sure of what signs she was seeking, Jole followed along, sparing a look-round for the sake of wider situational awareness. The place seemed profoundly peaceful.
“Ah,” said Cordelia at last. She stopped before what was plainly a standard-issue Barrayaran military grave marker from three or four decades back, the corrosion-proof metal deeply incised with Rosemont’s full name, rank, numbers and dates. It had been part-camouflaged by a few saplings crowding it, taller than Jole. Cordelia scowled at them, then unshipped her own sidearm—a more robust plasma arc—set it to narrow beam, and unceremoniously nipped them off at ground level and tossed them out of the way. She then set the arc to wide beam, low power, and circled the marker, clearing a broader patch in a controlled burn. It looked darkly tidy when she finished, as if the grave had been tended all along.
She pulled a vidcam from one of her trouser pockets and handed it to Jole. “I guess I’ll wing this. Be sure to get a good close-up of the marker, and some pans around at the view. If we flub, we can do it again, although…well, I’ll try not to flub.” Taking the bag of sand in her hands, she took up a stance by the marker and lifted her chin, her face settling into that tilted expression one took on when recording a message to a person invisible except in the mind’s eye. Jole fiddled with the viewfinder—why did they have to make the controls so tiny these days?—and then nodded for her to begin.
“Hello, Jaceta. As you can see, I received your message and your gift safely.” She held up the sandbag. “I’m standing here by Reg’s grave at the three-thousand-meter level of Mount Rosemont.” She paused while Jole moved in to get some good shots of the marker. “As you can also see, it is a very beautiful spot.” No lie, that; he panned in turn up at the shoulders of the great peak looming in the middle distance, then slowly wheeled to take in the whole wide plain below. For good measure, he added a few close shots of the most attractive of the low-growing native plants nearby that had escaped Cordelia’s cleanup. He returned the focus to her and motioned her to continue, which she did, producing a few kindly, flattering reminiscences of the deceased officer, and then slowly scattering the sand as if it were the seeds of some precious healing balm. She’d certainly had more than enough practice speaking at memorials these last three years. Presumably concerned lest the ceremony seem too brusque, she went on with what he recognized as a modified version of her Sergyar sales pitch, which he illustrated with a few more pans around at the present lovely scene. If one had to die and be buried, it all seemed to imply, this spot on Sergyar was a fine and private place to do so. Jole couldn’t disagree.
Cordelia’s eyes were growing a little strained as she continued to push out words toward their unknown destination. Jole rolled a finger to indicate she could probably wind up now. She did so, in the end not giving some Betan quasi-military salute, but just bowing mutely over her hands placed palm-to-palm. Blessing? Apology? Jole cut the vid.
“Oh-God-I-am-so-tired-of-death,” she declared in one unpent huff of breath, whether to the thin air or to him he was not quite sure. She unscrunched her eyes and smoothed her grimace, sighed, and trod over to collect the vidcam and stow it, plus the emptied plastic bag, in her satchel. “Hardly fair to Reg’s sister to say so, I suppose. My own fault, for stirring up whatever memories she had. No good deed goes unpunished and all that.”
He wanted to give her some more-substantial comfort in her reminded grief, or whatever this was, but physical intimacy was not the cure. They’d tried that once, in mutual desperation soon after Aral had gone, and it had ended in tears in all senses. She’d not seemed arousable, and his interest had soon flagged, weighted down by the distractions of the hour. It had been like two eunuchs trying to make love. (He wondered briefly how the bioengineered sexless Cetagandan ba made out, if at all. Did they even have anything like sex lives or drives?) In retrospect, he’d realized, he and Cordelia weren’t as practiced as it might have seemed. They’d never really made love to each other; they’d made love to or for Aral simultaneously. The ghost between them had still been far too palpable. They’d both sheered off, in a spirit of forgiveness rather than recrimination, canning comfort-sex as a bad idea. Or just badly timed…?
He wondered what memories were passing before her eyes, in this serene spot that had once hosted horrors. Something, for she stared a moment at the marker and said, “Huh! You know, you and Reg look—looked—something alike. Not in the shape of your face, but the height and the hair. His was light like yours. I wonder why I never noticed that before. I suppose…if he’d lived, he might look something like the way you do now.” She squinted at him, as if trying a new face on his form the way one would swap out clothes on a sales-vid image. “He was about three years younger than me. Four decades younger, now, frozen in time that he is.” She added after another moment, gazing down at the burned and sanded soil, “I expect he’s just clean bones down there. We had nothing for a coffin, or even a shroud—we stole his clothes for the living.”
How close had she been to her dead exec? Jole wondered. And if forty-five years could not supply recovery, what hope was there for him? “It’s been a long time.”
She scrubbed her hand through her curls in her typical impatient gesture. “We’d burned the hair once. It was all dead and buried well enough, till this damned sand thing brought it back up. I’m not sure there is any such thing as recovery; there’s only forgetting. One just has to…keep forgetting till one slowly gets better at it.”
Her echo of his thought briefly unnerved him. He said, “It’s as if people have to die twice, that.”
“Yeah,” she said, and neither of them needed to say which people. She wandered over to Jole, and they strolled arm-in-arm around the glade for a few minutes, letting the beauty of the mountain seep in. She was not trembling, nor showing any other outward signs of old traumatic stress renewed. But her mouth was still tight.
“Will you pick a home site on a mountain, for the view, when you retire?” he asked, watching her look out over the vastness.
Her lips relaxed a little. “Not me. Miles is the one who is in love with mountains. He’d adore this spot. No, I want to be on the water, right on it. I have a plan…I ought to show you the place sometime, but we’d need at least a day away from Kayburg, maybe two.”
“That sounds interesting,” he encouraged this line of thought. A day or two away from work, together, at some less fraught task than this forced memorial, with time to talk; that could be…good. He refused to give it any more specific label. Keep it open. What, for escape? He was hardly going anywhere.
She smiled, as if shy to be making this confession. “Actually, it’s more than a plan. I bought a stretch of shoreline some years back just as a bit of personal speculation, since I thought we’d be returning to Barrayar. Well, and because I’d fallen in love with it at first sight. It’s on a lobe of this sort of leaf-shaped natural sea harbor on the east side of the second continent. Far from the capital, old or proposed.”
Indeed, the very first settlements on that continent had been approved only a few years back. They could be no more than hardscrabble hamlets by now.
“I told myself it was prudently parental, because who knew where-all in the empire Miles’s or Mark’s kids will end up? One of them might want to move here…And then, well, plans changed. Everything changed. Things do that.”
“Yeah.” He gave her a cautious hug around the shoulders. Less self-consciously, he fancied, she rested her head against him for a moment. They still stood in angled sunlight at this altitude, but the plains below had gone formless and gray with the rising dusk.
Something dull orange glinted down there; a thin plume of smoke rose from the camouflaging shadows up into the light. “Huh. Is that a fire?”
Cordelia lifted her head and narrowed her eyes, too. “Seems to be. Brush fire? There are no settlements over that way.” She corrected after a moment, “That are registered.”
“Perhaps we ought to swing past and check it out.” It was time they were moving on anyway. When the dusk climbed to this level, some of Sergyar’s less-savory native creatures would be waking up and looking for breakfast. Mostly they didn’t know what to make of humans, but there were a few evil-tempered brutes that would try anything, and if they spat it out or threw it up later, that wasn’t much of a consolation to the mauled.
“Fire,” Cordelia recited, in her most Betan tone, “is a natural part of the ecosystem. But yeah.” She glanced in the direction of Kareenburg, its nimbus of lights visible at this distance even if its details were not. “It isn’t that far out of our way.”
By unspoken mutual agreement, they turned and made for the lightflyer.